So, made a promise to the wife that I would wait till my ranch sold to upgrade my new PC, and thus the new PMS… so… it closes next week
To that end, I have my Synology NAS and I have gone back and forth with trading that for a QNAP vs building a PC specifically for PMS.
My thinking was (and I saw it again last night)… I was watching a TV show on my PMS at the house and I had to turn the encoding down to 720 because the original was at like 2.6mbps and it was always buffering.
I was the only one watching, and it was on the internal network… so I think my I7-960 cpu is needing to be replaced
Now, since I really do not care about 4k… only care about watching up to 1080 without buffering, the scope of what I want is pretty open, so…
I bought a mini case. I am ordering a Z300 series mini motherboard and an Intel i7-8700k CPU. I planned to put a 256gb SSD for the C drive and plex itself, and a 1TB drive for downloading and such, then have it read the 30TB NAS.
I figured to add 2 8gb DDR4 sticks and whatever video card I have laying around (I think the board may even have video built in.)
The other idea was just buy a dang qnap that will work…but not sure I would be better off since doing 4k means a 1200+ dollar qnap… heh
Anyone have any last thoughts?
I am taking the family to Disneyworld so… she made me promise to focus on that… lol… but after thanksgiving… Cyber Monday… gonna get daddy all set up
R
Either QNAP (e.g TS-453Be) or Synology (DS-918+) with the J3455 CPU will do what you want and be future proof for 4K should you ever go there.
The ONE thing neither will do is PGS/VOBSUB subtitles (Image based subtitles) because subtitles have to be done by the CPU. You literally need a “honking” Intel CPU for that (e.g i7-class) and those are expensive… Yes, I have one… TVS-1282T.
Otherwise the J3455 Video ASIC (aka… GPU) does the hardware transcoding for you. Yes, it is strong enough to transcode 2160p 50+ Mbps down to even 720p using maybe 10% CPU. The worst hit you will take on either is approx 30% for the Audio codec (e.g. 7.1 -> Stereo) downmix.
The rest is entirely on the networking and TV settings / what it’s capable of but this gives you the hardware to get the video in H.264 for just about ANY player out there.
Not knowing much about synology performance, but just talking about pure processing, your current processor should be able to handle it. I used a 2012 mac mini and Intel Nuc and was able to process content without issue.
Not saying you should upgrade, but just want you to look at the whole picture. When you say internal network, are you on wifi? or is this all ethernet?
The i7-8700k CPU will kill anything you want to throw at it from the video perspective.
The only limitation it will suffer is handling subtitles but it is an i7 and, as such, It will power its way through them. You can safely expect HW decode of anything you give it, HW video encode but SW merge of the subtitles (this is what the main i7 must do and what the Synology/QNAP CPU cannot do well at all). I see no reason why you will not get at least 3 video streams with subtitles out of it concurrently.
Gotcha… well, when I go to do an actual order, I may get an even better CPU, just want to figure the best CPU for under $400. The rest should be fine for most anything.
Not sure why the i7-960 has an issue every now and then but, who knows… could be a crappy wifi signal… heh. I will be re-working all that as well.
